Charlie Watson is the AI Solutions Architect for the Nittany AI Alliance at Penn State. Charlie guides the development of Proof of Concept AI applications created by Nittany AI Advance student teams in collaboration with partnered organizations, fostering innovative solutions to real-world challenges. Previously, Charlie served as a Technical Team Lead on the SmartOCR Nittany AI Advance project, an LLM-OCR service that extracts academic information using Azure OpenAI and custom ML models. Their industry experience includes impactful internships at Chevron and FedEx Services, where they contributed to productization, web development, and API design, achieving significant cost savings and operational improvements. Charlie holds a master’s degree in informatics, specializing in computer vision, which complements their expertise in mentoring teams, fostering collaboration, and designing scalable AI infrastructures to address complex challenges and drive social impact.